Nemspansk

Earlier this week, Hasbro announced that it would be laying off approximately 1,100 employees two weeks before Christmas, as per an internal memo. At the time, I pointed out that the memo announced “the majority of the notifications will happen over the next six months, with the balance occurring over the next year.” While it doesn’t directly contradict this statement, many layoffs are happening right now.

A list of layoffs at Wizards of the Coast continues to grow—some have been substantiated via announcements on social media, while others are still being verified. Mike Mearls, a co-designer of D&D 5th edition, is potentially among their number—as per a BlueSky screenshot shared on Twitter.

Mearls had left WoTC’s RPG design team, and had been working on the …

The Nintendo DS was a treasure trove of wonderful surprises that never made it over to PC, but thankfully one of its greatest games is finally heading to Steam this summer. Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective has just been slapped with a June 30 release date, and I’m absolutely giddy. 

I mean, sure, I could just fire up my old DS and take it for a spin right now, interfering with inanimate objects to solve mysteries—including my own death—but I’m very much looking forward to playing it on a larger screen, alongside the promised audio and visual enhancements. 

Not au fait with this DS classic? Here’s the skinny: You’re dead! Shot by a mystery assailant, and now you’re a clueless ghost with no memory and only one night to figure out what the heck happened to y…

A few weeks back on PC Gamer, Crytek debuted Hunt: Showdown’s first new map in three years, Mammon’s Gulch. We all had a good time taking in the sights of Hunt’s vision of Colorado, a sun-baked mountain range with oil fields and an extensive mining operation, but Crytek was holding something back: There’s a new wild target on the loose in Mammon’s Gulch, and it’s arriving alongside a new event called Scorched Earth.

That target is the Hellborn, a towering fire demon who wanders the map hurling balls of lava at hunters who dare provoke him. Crytek describes the Hellborn as an “amalgam of fire and flesh” who “moves frantically to slag trespassing Hunters, scorching everything in its considerable reach.”

At a glance, the Hellborn looks like the meaner big brother of the Immolat…

Intel’s Raptor Lake refresh CPUs, including the Core i9 14900K, were fairly underwhelming. Apparently, however, that isn’t preventing Intel from spooling up another respin of Raptor Lake for later this year.

First things first, no this doesn’t mean that Intel’s upcoming Arrow Lake CPUs aren’t coming in 2024. Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger recently confirmed that Arrow Lake is still go for later this year.

Instead, YouTube channel RedGamingTech claims that Bartlett Lake will be sold alongside Arrow Lake as something of a mainstream offering to Arrow Lake’s premium positioning.

Exactly how Intel plans to segment the market between these purported Bartlett Lake chips and Arrow Lake isn’t clear beyond Arrow Lake sitting at the top of the stack. But there is one fairly significant…

There are many good reasons to opt for a tailor-made PC over a pre-built model, and you don’t have to be a tech expert to appreciate them.

Firstly there’s cost—you’re free to pick and choose the best value components across the whole market. Self-assembly doesn’t just save you even more money, but gives you valuable insight into how things work under the hood.

There’s also customization. Custom-built rigs mean no extra costs for features you don’t need, and the end product will look and feel exactly as stylish as you want it to.

Finally, there’s future-proofing. With a home-built rig you can upgrade piece-by-piece at your own pace, following either your own whims or the cutting edge of tech development.

So, ahead …

You can’t bequeath your Steam account to your loved ones when the sad day of your passing comes around, at least not without breaking the TOS, but it turns out you can leave your GOG games to someone—as long as everyone involved is willing to do some legwork up front.

Nobody likes to think about this sort of thing too much, and when we do I imagine we’re generally more focused on what needs to be deleted rather than what should be left for others. (Or maybe that’s just me?) But most of us have accumulated sizable digital game libraries over the years, and it’s a genuinely awful waste to let them be lost, especially when we know others who would appreciate such a gift.

Giving someone your username and password is easy enough, but legally bequeathing a digital library tu…

An Apex Legends trailer released this past week shows off what to expect in Season 21, Upheaval, when it drops this week on 7 May. The trailer shows off Alter, the first evil character to get added in quite a few years, and the new 

New Legend Alter is one of those cackling, clever, cutting evil people who delights in destruction for destruction’s sake, given her behavior in the trailer. She seems like she’d say something mean to you on your birthday, of all days. Terrible.

Perhaps more seriously, the trailer shows off her suite of abilities: Gift from the Rift, which grabs items from deathboxes at a distance, Void Damage, which lets you crack open a portal to move through walls and floors, and ultimate Void Nexus, which lets anyone on her team pop open a one-way portal…

It took the better part of a month but Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, the tale of a boy and his buddies discovering a shared love of entomology, finally has support for ultrawide displays. And that’s not all: Private lobbies for the co-op Operations mode are also live and there’s a new Sparring Arena in the Battle Barge that lets players “compete in friendly PvP with the players in their squad.” Players who like to fiddle with their look will be happy to hear that a convenient option to reset custom armor and color presets to their default settings has been added to the customization menu.

Those are the highlights, but there are some pretty big changes happening under the hood too. Enemy aggressiveness at the Veteran difficulty level has been toned down for a “better singlepl…

Remember Candlekeep? The monastic library-fortress was the first area of the original Baldur’s Gate, a place for introductory sidequests like curing a sick cow, finding a book in a haystack, and murdering rats in a storehouse. Classic stuff, most of which I managed to miss the first time I played it because I was naive enough to think I should get on with my quest instead of thoroughly rinsing the tutorial zone for every possible bit of XP. Oops.

While you do get to return to Candlekeep in chapter six of Baldur’s Gate, we almost got to revisit it again in Baldur’s Gate 3. “I had a bunch of ideas for it,” lead writer Adam Smith told Rock Paper Shotgun. “I think that it’s a good setting, partly because it’s going back to where it all began. So that was always compelling. But also be…